No, 'The Substance' Doesn't Hate Demi Moore

Spoilers ahead for The Substance!

It’s that time again-end-of-year/best-of lists abound. Which means it’s the time to watch some of your favorite movies of the year get decimated on the internet even as other people praise them.

One of my favorites of the year was, undoubtedly, The Substance. I’m far from alone in that. But The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s grotesque fable of the no-win battle that is being visible as a woman, got more than its fair share of hate, in my opinion. The film was decried as a tired cliche of the oppressive-beauty-standards trope, and I heard more than one critic describe to me how the movie distains its leads and delivers a vapid, predictable tale of lusting after youth and adoration.

I think there’s a big element missing from these dismissive responses. They pick apart the movie technically but don’t engage with it emotionally. And to be fair, it might just be the kind of experience that just doesn’t hook folks who have never felt the particular kind of terror that it’s depicting.

The Substance follows Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), the fading movie star and exercise video personality who’s hit fifty and is unceremoniously cast aside from the show she built because Harvey (Dennis Quaid) and his entertainment industry machinery need the new-not the fifty-ish. Through a sci-fi twist of fate, Elizabeth gets access to a mysterious “substance” that gives her access to a younger, “better” version of herself — embodied by Margaret Qualley, as “Sue.” Cue the horrific decline in pursuit of perfection, with a disastrous ending waiting just off-screen.

So much of the criticism boils down to: well, Dennis Quaid is depicted so clearly as a sexist boor off the bat, why do we have to linger on it? We get that Demi Moore increasingly hates her body, so why harp on it? We get that Margaret Qualley is hot, so why do we need all those closeups? It’s all so obvious. What is this Dorian Gray story even doing? This movie hates its characters, obviously. …To which I vehemently disagree.

The defining element of The Substance, for me, and its greatest success was that it makes you feel these women’s desperation and self-hatred-not because of vanity or because of greed, but because of their desire to be seen as worthy of the life they labor endlessly for.

As Margaret Qualley frantically pushes more and more of the titular substance out of desperation, when her better, perfect body proves unsustainable, she isn’t doing it out of vanity but out of terror. No one wants to be pretty in this movie. The dangers of not being pretty enough, young enough, good enough is that you will lose your right to be treated like a worthwhile person. The danger is being discarded-being alone, in a profound and crushing exile from your own life. And the arbiter of your worth-whether you like it or not-is an orange buffoon named Harvey who is held to no standards whatsoever.

It’s extreme and absolutist in its storytelling, as fables tend to be-unsubtle in its presentation, but not in its meaning.

The real horror of this story is the possibility-the destiny-of becoming the grotesque. The broken, continually fading thing that slowly loses its right to love and comfort and happiness. That’s the helpless and awful conclusion-a literal, ridiculous, unspeakable creature who invokes nothing but horror and hatred, literally torn apart in her attempt to convince her audience that she is someone they’ve claimed to love before.

This isn’t a vain pursuit of youth and beauty-it’s a struggle for survival in a cycle of self-destruction.

While I was watching The Substance, I was reminded of that media studies classic on the male gaze, Roland Barthes’ Ways of Seeing: “A woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself […] She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.”

In other words: an internalized gaze that supplants who you are with how you are seen.

One of the most heartbreaking scenes for me is when Elizabeth is on her way out the door to her date (with a man she’s really only reaching out to out of a sense of isolation), but first sees her reflection in the door handle. She reaches for the handle. She can’t go. She’s trapped by her reflection. The image is imperfect. She can’t appear this way. The perfect, young, confident version of herself glows on a billboard outside of her window.

She can’t reach that standard-and that is fully by design. In reality, not even Sue-the mechanism for selling that goal-can. The world needs her and every woman in it to demand more of themselves, no matter how lovely, how elegant, how happy, how desirable she is. She should be more. The next sequence of Elizabeth coating herself in make up, piling a scarf around her neck and over her chest, wiping the makeup into a blurred mess across her face…It’s all a predetermined defeat. Once you begin to fight the battle, you’ve already lost.

Is that a cliched message? Maybe. But this movie made me feel it in a way that has stuck with me for months. And its framing as a life-and-death struggle seems suitably horrific.

Those who insist that the movie hates its lead are reading hatred without tracing it to its root; Elizabeth loathes herself and has worked her entire life to avoid allowing anyone else to reveal that same disdain. The whole impetus of the story comes as Elizabeth, never missing a beat, never breaking her smile, is rejected from the life she’s built like so much debris from someone else’s profit margin.

The power to be safe is the thing both Elizabeth and Sue are chasing, and the impossibility of that safety eventually devours and destroys, as it will time and time again. So yes, this movie is far from subtle. But it succeeds in being heartfelt and devastating in a way that I found brutally effective.